Writing sprints & sessions: the lowdown

It's been mentioned that it might be useful to have the info about sprints & sessions consolidated into one post. Good idea! Here's some quick & dirty info:

Both writing sprints & sessions are conducted via group chat. Anyone can run a sprint or a session (especially welcome because we have members in a wide variety of timezones), & we welcome people announcing them to the comm.

A sprint is where several people meet in a chatroom & then write for a short specified period of time--say, 20 minutes. There's a quick break, & people then might go on to do more sprints as well. Some people compete to see who can write the most words in a sprint; some people then share what they've written with other people in the chat. (Some people, like me, find that too scary. ;)

A session is longer--ideally 2 hours or more. People come into the chatroom, say hi & maybe talk about what they're going to work on. Then people stop chatting & start writing, with short breaks, if they want, every half-hour or hour, to commiserate or cheer or whatever.

Edit: Writing sessions are now run on IRC, where there is a semi-permanent chat room; see this post for details.

The person who volunteers to run the sprint or session will post beforehand confirming the time & the name of the chatroom--for example, WriteThisFanficSessions is the room name I use.

You need AIM to get into the chats (unless, as above, people agree to use Gmail chat or another method beforehand). You can use a web client like Meebo to join the chat in your browser, or another client like Adium. This comment below gives details on how to join a session using AIM alone.

There are step-by-step tutorials (w/screenshots!) for several different chat clients here that may be useful!

Please let me know if there's other information that should be included in this post & I'll edit it. I'll also add a link to this entry to the comm's sticky post.

To get into an existing chatroom using the latest version of AIM (7.5.8.2) alone, I use the following:Go to options menu (on its own in the top right) Choose ‘New group chat’In ‘Usernames to invite’ insert your own usernameIn ‘Chat Room’ insert the name of the chat: e.g., ‘writethisfanficsessions’